Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle | Love / 1919

all dressed for the wedding

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Vincent Bryan (screenplay), Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (director) Love / 1919

 

Nearly all of Roscoe Arbuckle’s films are heterosexual romances between “Fatty” and young women. The women generally are very much in love with Roscoe, but the fathers and mothers of these virginal young girls are set against it, sometimes because of social status but mostly simply because of his large girth. In order to get their permission or more often simply to “get to” the girl, locked away in parental isolation, Fatty has no choice but to change gender, himself becoming a girlfriend, a mother, a cook, whatever it takes to enter the symbolic harem into which the early 20th century fathers have hidden away their precious child. The narrative is centered about not only on how he achieves his goal, but how quickly he can outrace parental and societal authorities in their attempts to thwart his desires.

      Arbuckle, in fact, almost always seems most at home in drag and gets what he wants, sometimes even marrying the object of his affections while still affecting the mannerisms and dress of her own sex.

      His 1919 film Love is an almost archetypal example. This film lays out the situation in simple terms: Fatty and Al Clove (Al St. John) are rivals for Winne’s had, and have both set out on a journey to win her in marriage. To signify how truly infantile and preposterous these two men are, Fatty has set out in a kind of motorized child’s wagon he has titled a “Fordette,” and Al is traveling on an outsized unicycle with a back trainer wheel.

       Meanwhile, on the farm Winne is milking a cow while the farmhand, Mario Bianchi (Monty Banks) is beating a rug, the act of which becomes the center of a great deal of this film’s comic shtick as time again he accidentally strikes the asses of individuals with his broom, they, in turn, taking a broom to his bum, at one point, he, Fatty, and Winnie’s father Frank (Frank Hayes) all joining in on the broom-spanking fun.

       At the moment Fatty arrives, however, Frank is at the well, about to pull up a bucket of water when the Fordette, crashing into the rug sends Mario flying into Frank who falls into the endlessly deep well. A great part of the film is occupied with Mario and Fatty’s attempt to wind the rope back up to bring Winne’s father back to the surface only to accidentally let the crank and rope loose, sending the rope, bucket and its human content back into the depths. At one point the father, Mario, and even the late-arriving Al all end up in deep water with only Fatty to save them. But since at that very moment the cook (Kate Price) rings the dinner bell, Fatty wanders off to the house, the three of them forced to climb out all by themselves.

      Just before they join the dinner table, Al hands Winne’s father a letter written by his own father noting that while his son is “Not so bright,” he, nonetheless, agrees to give his neighbor half his land if only he will let his son marry Winne. How could a greedy dirt father pass up such an offer, particularly given the fact that, as Fatty tells his lover, her father already doesn’t like him because “I’m so fat?” Even the heavy-set cook suggests he go on a diet. His interchange with her after makes him no friends in the kitchen of Winnie’s ranch.

       And when the three well survivors arrive at the table, Frank sends Fatty packing, declaring to a resistant Winnie that she shall marry Al the very next day. With her continued statements of refusal, he locks her away in her room.

 

      Tossing her a message wrapped around a rock, Fatty encourages the girl to become Juliet for his Romeo, as he climbs up a ladder to help her escape, she tossing down her packed bag, which inevitably ends with him crashing back to earth and into the dinner room window. All of which sends him once again on the run, her father on the chase, while Winne now hangs from the window sill, her father and Mario forced to climb the roof from the other side in order to extricate her.

       To get his revenge on the family and their cook, Fatty tosses slivers of soap into the bubbling beef stew, resulting in the firing of the cook and call for a new servant. The well-dressed Arbuckle shows up to apply for the new cook’s position. She gets the job by producing false credentials saying she has simply left the service by choice of a previous employer.

      It is wedding day, and the soon-to-be bride, attended by the cook, is in tears, the cook almost ready to hug her in sympathy before he recalls who he now is supposed to be. When the wedding time approaches, the novice parson about to officiate his very first wedding ceremony, even states his own nervousness, the cook offering to stand in for the groom for a rehearsal. Mario, in alliance with Fatty, hands him the ring which he quickly slips on her finger as the minister practices his lines “I now declare you....”

      In the other room the wedding party waits, and soon the “real” wedding begins. But obviously when time comes for the parson to ask the long-dreaded question “If anyone here know any reason why two should not be wed...” the cook moves through the door into the wedding room, her dress pulled away by Mario to reveal Fatty, with evidence on hand (her hand) that she is already married....to him! The marriage of a few minutes earlier, if you recall, was made between to individuals believed to both be women. 

      Love takes the incident from Arbuckle’s The Butcher Boy (1917), where they enter the justice of the police while he is still in drag, even further by not even bothering to retire from his cross-dressing role in winning the distressed damsel in marriage in this film. In short, he pushes the trope so far that it almost doesn’t even matter whether or not he is a transgender figure; to continue in the language of these seemingly traditionally romantic tales, he still wins the hand of the one he loves.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).